There’s a boatload of Italians in my hotel, so I heard quite a bit of Italian today. It does not really fit the environment and our preparation for a tournament in Croatia. Apparently the Italians plan their holidays in this country and get their teeth worked at while being here. A rather big business in Zagreb, so I’ve been told. Even the hotel staff is quite fluent with the language. Well, at least their Italian is way better than mine, and they handle the staccato orders without any problems whatsoever. The Italian archers on the other hand, did not arrive yet.

I tried to pick up my accreditation, but the accreditation team starts tomorrow. So I took one of the shuttle busses to the field, which was about a 15 minute drive. Then we walked to the field, about another 15 minutes. The practice field is just behind a small lake in the park, which is swamped with tortoises. Apparently this population was kick started by people releasing their pet tortoises in the lake, but they have offspring now. The tortoises that is, I don’t know about the people fed up with them.

The park itself is rather hilly but they managed to find a flat area for the practice field. It is not that big for a world championship, there are 24 bosses and I reckon it will be crowded on the official training. Today we met with two English archers, a couple of the American archers, a decent contingent Australians, two Czechs and a few Croatian archers. The bosses are close to each other which is very smart. It is nearly impossible to shoot at an angle at the targets, which typically is a reason people get their arrows destroyed on the practice field. No such thing here.

Another thing I noticed on the field is that tiger mosquitos and regular black mosquitos like the park as well. And they like fresh blood too, even during the day. You might want to bring some repellent.